The Anniversary Of The Day My Wife Was Attacked

This is a week of anniversaries for me. We all share one of them, obviously, with various degrees of separation. People I knew, and one man I considered a personal hero, died on that day. But today, well, today is the day that it got really, seriously, personal.

Today is the anniversary of the day that insurgents in Afghanistan tried, generally speaking, to kill my wife.

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I guess that requires a little explanation. My wife and I are something of a "mixed marriage." I am a soldier. She is a diplomat. In other words, I wage war to end them by winning; she uses diplomacy in an attempt to end them with words. Yes, our dinner table is sometimes an interesting place.

So it was that three years ago, when I found that my orders were changed, we had to make some decisions. Suddenly, instead of moving to France, I was moving to England. This was done to bring me to the unit where I am serving today so that I could be with the unit when it went to Afghanistan three months later. Not long after that my wife made her own decision. At the time she was working on Richard Holbrooke's "Afghanistan-Pakistan" team at "Main State," the State Department's Washington, D.C., headquarters. She specialized in South Asia, and speaks and reads (though she will say "badly") both Urdu and Hindi. Not bad for a girl from Maine. But her decision, well, I was not so sure about that. She volunteered to serve at US Embassy in Kabul.

And that is why, two years ago, while I was serving as a strategist at the NATO headquarters to the north of Kabul, I nearly lost my mind. My wife was at the US Embassy in downtown Kabul, and Afghan terrorists/insurgents, probably a part of the Haqqani network, launched a series of coordinated attacks across downtown Kabul, with the greatest effort going towards hitting the US Embassy.

Yeah, that made it personal.

The thing is that I almost do not mind it when people try to kill me. Indeed, I sort of understand it. I wear a uniform, a helmet, body armor, and by personal preference always carry an assault rifle instead of a pistol when I am in a combat zone.* Somebody who is a combatant should, obviously, view me as a combatant as well. Having people try to kill me is a part of the environment I signed up for these many years, and decades, ago. But shooting at my wife? Just because she is a diplomat? Yeah, you just made sure of one thing.

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In wars gone by I can assure you, the men who carry the rifles more often feel more anger and disgust for their own higher headquarters (justified or not, this is human nature in the military context) than they do hatred towards those they are fighting. Barring the manic that affects one when you are personally getting shot at (mortared/shelled/rocketed fall in a different category, believe me), you generally know how they, your antagonists, are feeling as well. But that only applies if your enemy is not violating the norms.

Shooting at civilians, deliberately, is not supposed to be done. I was raised as an officer for example, to acknowledge that large parts of our bombing campaigns in WWII were, morally, wrong. In the end they were effective in a way, but the technology of the day did not allow for precision. My Lai, the massacre in Vietnam, was taught to us on the basis that by acknowledging that wrong, we might prevent the same obscenity in the future. And so on. So now, while there are low-level anomalies, by and large we work the way we are supposed to. This only makes my anger, and yes, it was anger, at the attack against our civilians in Kabul all the stronger.

In the end, of course, it was not the "Tet 1968" moment that perhaps was desired by the enemy. They were small-scale, duffers, and incompetent on just about every level. My wife was safe, once she got to shelter. Indeed all the diplomats made it through. And the attack, all totaled up, probably had just over a dozen men. Barring the media attention it was not really significant, as evidenced by the fact that most of you probably did not know that today was the anniversary. Sadly, the only people these misguided men succeeded in hurting before they themselves died at the hands of the Afghan security forces, were other Afghans. Simple, innocent, law-abiding citizens who happened to be at the US EMB trying to get visas when the attack started.

When wars are personal, wars tend to continue.

You can write to me at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com. As always, these are my opinions, and they do not reflect the positions of any part of the US Government, the Army, NATO, or anybody else.

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